Parables of Inner Space: Briefing for a Descent into Hell, The Summer Before the Dark, and The Memoirs of a Survivor

While R. D. Laing’s statement underscores the thematic concerns of the three novels that Lessing published after completing Children of Violence, Insan-i-Kamil’s description in ‘The Sufi Path’ might also be used to describe formal departures in those same novels. Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), The Summer Before the Dark (1973), and The Memoirs of a Survivor (1975), in varying degrees, focus on characters at odds with their societies because of ‘experience of other dimensions’. The novels present the conflicts between one- and multi-dimensional people in narrative structures that undercut what many might see as the ‘tedious methods of “A to Z”’ in the traditional realist novel. The theme itself, particularly in the examination of the meaning of normal, is not new to Lessing. Indeed, The Four-Gated City maps Martha’s exploration of that terrain so much that Joan Didion notes ‘one would have thought Mrs Lessing had more or less exhausted its possibilities’.3